What to put in your Clan Castle

Almost everyone sets their Clan Castle once, whenever they joined a clan that donates, and then leaves it alone for years. It is the one building that another person fills for you, which is exactly why it gets forgotten, and why so many accounts walk into war with a castle holding whatever a stranger happened to drop in eight months ago.

The thing worth understanding first is that the castle does two entirely separate jobs, and they want opposite things.

• On offence, the troops and spells inside travel with you and deploy when you drop them. This is bonus army space that does not cost you camp space.
• On defence, the same castle holds troops that come out when an attacker gets close, and defend the entire base.

You only get one castle, so whatever is in it right now is doing both jobs. That is the tension the whole rest of this page is about.

How much it actually holds

Capacity comes from your Town Hall, not from anything you choose. This is the same table the army link checker validates against, so it is what the game actually enforces.

Below TH8 the castle holds 10 to 20 space and no spells; the exact numbers for those halls sit on the Town Hall pages.

Two things in that table are worth reading twice.

The siege slot opens at TH10. The Workshop that lets you build a siege machine does not arrive until TH12. So there are two entire Town Halls where you can be carried into the core by a donated Wall Wrecker or Log Launcher, and almost nobody at TH10 or TH11 asks for one. It is the most wasted slot in the game.

Spell slots stack on top of your spell factory. They are not competing with your own spells, they are extra. A player at TH14 with three castle spell slots is bringing three more spells than their army list suggests, and most of them are bringing none.

What to request for your own attack

There is no best castle troop, only the one that fills the hole in the army you are already running. That is why the request is a message, not a lottery.

Work it out in this order.

1. 1What does my army fail at? If attacks die to the Town Hall compartment, you want damage. If your Queen dies on the walk, you want something that tanks or something that kills the defending castle for her.
2. 2Do I want spells instead? From TH11 this is a real question and the answer is often yes. A castle Rage on the final push, or an Invisibility to pull a hero out of trouble, changes more attacks than four extra housing space of troops does.
3. 3Is a siege the answer? If you are TH10 or above and your funnel is the problem, the siege slot beats both of the above.

What to donate to other people

The donor side has one rule that covers nearly everything: donate what was asked for, at the level you actually have.

That second half is the part that quietly matters. Castle troop quality comes out of your lab, and a level behind is a level behind in somebody else's war attack. This is why donation troops sit as high as they do in the upgrade order: the lab does not use a builder, so keeping your donation troops current costs you nothing except remembering.

The one thing worth refusing is a blank request from someone in a war right now. Ask what the army is first. Filling a war castle with the wrong troops is worse than leaving it empty, because they cannot be removed once they are in.

The defending castle

This is where most of the value is, and where almost nobody puts any thought.

Your defending castle is not trying to stop the attack. Against a competent attacker it will not. Its job is to cost them something: a lure, a Poison spell, and thirty seconds of a three minute clock. Judge everything you put in it by that standard.

Two properties do the work.

Hard to clear quickly. The castle will be lured out and Poisoned. Troops that rely on numbers are the worst possible choice, because one spell deletes the whole group at once. A smaller number of high health units survives the poison and keeps costing the attacker time.

Threatens heroes. A defending unit that runs at the Queen forces the attacker to spend an ability, a Freeze, or the walk itself. Hero seeking troops punch far above their housing space for exactly this reason.

Everything else is fashion and it moves with every balance patch. What does not move is the test: if the troop is easy to kill in one spell, or it ignores the attacker's heroes, it is the wrong troop no matter what a tier list said this season.

Requesting without becoming the person nobody donates to

Donations are the most visible thing you do in a clan. Everyone can see the ratio, and it is the first number leaders look at.

• Request specifically, as above. It is faster for the donor as well as better for you.
• Fill your castle before a war attack, not during it. Requesting at the last minute means attacking with whatever arrives, if anything does.
• Give roughly what you take. Nobody is counting exactly, but a 200 given to 9,000 received ratio tells your leadership what kind of member you are, and it comes up in exactly the conversation you would rather it did not.
• Donate the troop, not the leftover. Dumping four Barbarians into an open request to farm donation count is worse than not donating, because it closes the slot.

If you are running the clan rather than playing in it, the donation ratio is one of the few genuinely useful signals a member profile gives you, and it sits next to war attendance in the same picture. That combination is what the clan management side of this site exists to show you, and defensive castles are worth a sweep before a war search goes out.